For the better part of an hour, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has been kicked back in the front cabin of Coast Guard One, the small but handsomely appointed plane on which she travels, chatting easily about the challenges of running the third-largest Cabinet department.
Matthew Yglesias scorns the notion of building a double wall on the Mexican border to reduce illegal immigration:
Everybody is aware of the drama now being played out in Dubai. And, frankly, the relief given by Abu Dhabi, its abutting oil-rich emirate in the confederation of self-indulgent and non-productive Arabs, will only buy time for Dubai, which will have to turn over to its cousins whatever assets remain under its robes.
Famine: A Short History
By Cormac Ó Gráda
(Princeton University Press, 327 pp., $27.95)
The earliest recorded famines, according to Cormac Ó Gráda in his brief but masterful book, are mentioned on Egyptian stelae from the third millennium B.C.E. In that time--and to an extent, even today, above the Aswan dam in Sudan--farmers along the Nile were dependent on the river flooding to irrigate their fields. But one flood out of five, Ó Gráda tells us, was either too high or too low. The result was often starvation. The stelae commemorate the philanthropy of the aristocracy in providing food to the hungry. Other records of famine in the ancient world can be found in texts as various as Gilgamesh, the Joseph narrative in Genesis, Nehemiah, Cicero, and the Book of Revelation, in which the figure of famine is the third of the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
The ouster of Honduran President Manuel Zelaya has provided Latin America with a revelatory moment. Beginning with the Monroe Doctrine--and extending through countless invasions, occupations, and covert operations--Washington has considered the region its backyard. So where was this superpower these past few months, as Honduras hung in the balance? More or less sitting on its hands. The fact is that the United States is no longer willing, or perhaps even able, to select who governs from Tegucigalpa, or anywhere else in the region for that matter. Looking back at the history of the hemisphere, this fact is remarkable--and certainly transformative. For the first time in centuries, the United States doesn’t seem to care much what happens in Latin America.
There's an interesting back-and-forth between Dan Gross and Tim Geithner in Newsweek's year-end interview issue:
GROSS: There have been, and continue to be, calls for you to go. How do you deal with those?
I don't mean to seem hardhearted. But I am frankly completely jaded--and made disbelieving--with the on-schedule, almost once-a-week story about the crisis in Gaza. Around Christmas, they are simply de rigeur.
Analysts are still mulling over the Copenhagen accord, trying to figure out what it means for the fate of global climate politics. The humdrum answer is that it all depends—we'll have to see how individual nations tackle their CO2 emissions in the months and years ahead, and then watch how the next round of international talks shake out. But if it's specifics you want, check out Harvard economist Robert Stavin's analysis. First, a recap of the negotiations that led to the deal:
Given that there's virtually no chance a finished climate treaty will come out of the upcoming talks in Copenhagen, one might be forgiven for asking what, exactly, the world's diplomats are actually going to do these next two weeks in Denmark. Already, further talks are scheduled for next year—including yet another big climate summit in Mexico City in 2010.
With U.S. unemployment at a 26-year high Americans will be feeling the economic downturn for some time. Immigration experts are seeing global signs of the recession in major shifts in U.S. immigration trends, especially at the high and low ends of the skills spectrum. Here are the most significant changes.
You know the U.S. is in a recession when…
Mexicans are sending money to relatives in the United States.
In 2007, Mexicans living in the U.S. sent about $26 billion to relatives living in Mexico. The amount of remittances dropped to $25 billion in 2008, the first decline since the Central Bank of Mexico started keeping track 14 years ago. In the first nine months of 2009, the Bank reports that only $16.4 billion has been sent south, a 13 percent decline from 2008. Now, there are some signs of an increase in “reverse remittances,” in which residents of Mexico wire money to their relatives north of the border to help them through tough times. While still a small fraction of the north-to-south remittance flow, which provides Mexico with its second largest source of foreign income (after oil exports), an uptick in reverse remittances is a striking example of the ripple effects of U.S. job loss.
H1-B visas are still available.
In fiscal year 2009, the H1-B visa program that links high-skilled immigrants with sponsoring U.S. employers had all 65,000 application slots filled in one day. In FY08, it took two days, and in FY07, 56 days. But things have changed. After 211 days into the 2010 fiscal year, there were almost twenty thousand slots still available. With high unemployment and shrinking budgets many corporations are unable to hire from abroad as they did in recent years. What’s more, companies that receive federal bailout funds must hire U.S. workers or demonstrate they are cannot find them if they do. Technology firms for years have pressured Congress to increase the number of H1-B visas. This may be a break for domestic tech workers who have often been on the other side of the argument.
This may only be of interest to fellow members of the El Paso diaspora, but it's pretty damn interesting to me. From today's Wall Street Journal:
The violence in Mexico has provided an unexpected economic boost to El Paso, a city of more than 600,000 residents at the westernmost tip of Texas. The unemployment rate here was 9.8% in September, equal to the national average but far lower than in other border towns such as Brownsville and McAllen.
Cindy Ramos-Davidson, chief executive of the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said her staff was swamped with requests from Juárez businesspeople wanting to settle in El Paso. They started more than 200 companies in the 12 months ended July 31, a 40% jump from the same period last year.
"It's the largest migration of wealthy Mexican nationals [to El Paso] since the Mexican Revolution," said Beto O'Rourke, an El Paso city councilman, referring to the decadelong rebellion that began in 1910. ...
The number of murders in Juárez exploded in the spring of 2008 and grew to more than 300 a month by August and September 2009, the highest monthly levels in a particularly violent year.
One migrant is Aril Anzures, who recently opened a branch of his family's burrito business on busy North Mesa Street in El Paso. After several kidnapping attempts, the Anzures family moved north earlier this year, though they still own seven restaurants in Mexico.
One question: My memory of living in El Paso (this would have been the 1980s) is that there was a correlation between crime on our side of the border and crime on the Mexican side. Crime rates on our side were usually lower, but typically rose when they rose in Juarez. Particularly theft--stolen cars and home break-ins were a big problem. But the Journal suggests this isn't happening:
All dictators, from Creon onwards, are victims. --Gabriel García Márquez
I.
Many years later, in the course of writing his memoirs, Gabriel García Márquez was to remember that distant afternoon in Aracataca, in Colombia, when his grandfather set a dictionary in his lap and said, "Not only does this book know everything, it’s the only one that’s never wrong." The boy asked, "How many words are in it?" "All of them," his grandfather replied.
The U.S. increasingly displays characteristics that we have seen many times in middle-income “emerging markets”--new dimensions of vast inequality, forms of financial instability that benefit the best connected, and consistently easy credit for the privileged. But this raises the question: Who exactly is going to dominate our economic and political landscape moving forward?
Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, is a bleak, dusty factory town across the border from El Paso, Texas. Long a nexus for drug runners vying for control of smuggling routes, it has earned a reputation for gunfights, abductions, and murdered women. In recent weeks, the violence fueled by drug cartels has spiked, and not for the first time. There have been beheadings, public shootouts, and murders of dealers, police, and bystanders. The U.S. Consulate has issued a travel advisory for the area. And, in the midst of all this, Juárez has a message for you: Looking for a good deal on heart surgery?
What kind of deal did the administration and Senate Finance Chairman Max Baucus make with the drug industry? And was it a good deal? I (try to) answer those questions in an article that appears in TNR's latest print edition--and is running on our (new!) home page today.
By Thanksgiving, Manuel Jesus Cordova Soberanes had been walking for two days pretty much straight. He had already illegally crossed the U.S.-Mexico border--"I have two families, many mouths to feed," he told the AP yesterday--when about 50 miles outside of Tucson, in the empty desert, he saw a nine-year old boy accompanied only by his dog and holding the side mirror of a van.
My wife and I were about to put our house on the market before Hurricane Katrina. I remind myself of this as we contemplate an act that has taken on the trappings of civic treachery--putting our house on the market now, a year after Katrina. It's true: We really were talking to realtors last summer. It was time to downsize, we said. Empty-nest syndrome, we said. That was our cover. Secretly, we were a bit freaked out about hurricanes even before Katrina. (At least I was.) Not so secretly, we were certain the national real estate bubble had reached its soapy and iridescent limit.
I flew to Oregon to pick pears with migrant workers. We had a month to kill, and wanted an adventure that combined rugged physical exertion with a hint of social conscience. But the expedition ended badly. When we arrived in Medford, suspicious foremen, convinced we were muckrakers or immigration agents, insisted they had no work. After a week of rejections, we were reluctantly hired by a small company, and soon discovered why we were the only American citizens in the field.
From The Editors: In his State of the Union address Wednesday, President Obama outlined his vision for economic recovery--and many of his ideas bore striking resemblance those Bill Clinton proposed when he was running for president in 1992. In a TNR article penned that year, Robert Reich (who would eventually become Clinton’s labor secretary) described the Democratic nominee’s economic plan. “The centerpiece of the Clinton plan is a major increase in public investment in education, training, and infrastructure,” Reich wrote.
Will the all-too-precipitate departure of the black nations brand the twenty-first Olympiad as "the White Games?" This was obviously Africa's purpose in exiting en bloc, if helter-skelter: to emphasize the dignity of the black man by undermining the international character of the event.
